Join the Army
Alan Johnson has some good advice for the Labour leader Ed Miliband - get some life experience before you start telling other people how to run their affairs.
I find it incredible that so many politicians these days seek a career in politics almost straight after leaving university, Ed Miliband being a good example as he worked as a researcher for the Labour Party before going on to become a special adviser to Gordon Brown in 1997.
Maybe it's not too late, but I can recommend Alan Johnson's book 'This Boy' and his wider outlook on life too - he an interesting character, a man with a hinterland as they say.
Alan Johnson: ‘Miliband should have gone away and joined the army’
Alan Johnson near his Parliament office
David Bebber/ The Times
Damian Whitworth
Published at 12:01AM, September 17 2014
In his life before politics Alan Johnson was a postman for 20 years and for a while his round included Dorneywood, the 18th-century mansion in Buckinghamshire used by senior government ministers as a country retreat. Johnson would deliver the mail to a servants’ entrance and never got to look around inside.
By the time Labour came to power in 1997 it had become usual for the house, which is in the gift of the prime minister, to be occupied by the chancellor of the exchequer, but Gordon Brown wanted nothing to do with it. He was, however, very taken with Johnson’s connection to the property.
“Gordon was very excited when he found out. I was PPS [parliamentary private secretary] in the Treasury, my first job in 1997, and someone told him. Gordon would never go there but when he found out I used to deliver there he said: ‘We must find a way to get Alan down there — walk in the front entrance rather than the servants’ entrance.’ I was really looking forward to that but nothing came of it. I felt I shouldn’t go and bother the chancellor: ‘Gordon, remember about taking me to Dorneywood?’ ”
The house was used by John Prescott but still no invitation was forthcoming. Then in 2006 the deputy prime minister was criticised for playing croquet there when he was in charge of the country while Tony Blair was on holiday. “Then everyone had a real fear of using it. I longed to go there for just one weekend but it never happened,” says Johnson. “Now of course George is there . . .”
How about it, Mr Osborne? A Tory chancellor inviting a former Labour former home secretary and shadow chancellor to see inside Dorneywood? Johnson looks a little uncertain when I suggest this could happen, but does volunteer that Osborne is a fan of his book,This Boy. Osborne tweeted that it was “powerful, beautifully written and an extraordinary personal story”.
Johnson, 64, is that rare thing: a politician who is not only popular with MPs on both sides of the House but who connects with voters of all political persuasions. This has been seen to be particularly so since the publication last year of the first volume of his memoirs, which describe his upbringing in a Notting Hill slum. His drunken father beat his mother before walking out on the family, then Johnson’s adored mother died when he was 13, leaving his older sister, Linda, to care for him. The book received glowing reviews, became a bestseller, won awards and prompted a round of comment that perhaps Johnson was the best prime minister we never had.
His new book, Please, Mister Postman, takes us from the late 1960s to the late 1980s and explains how he found a route into politics from the most improbable beginnings. In 1968, aged just 18, Johnson married his first wife, Judy, who was already a single mother, and gave up a job as a shelf-stacker to become a junior postman, first in west London, then in Slough and its rural hinterland.
Johnson left school at 15 but was an autodidact who read voraciously. He bought The Times but was worried about being regarded as pretentious by his colleagues, so hid it “as if it were a pornographic magazine”. However, he writes that he discovered that the sorting office “included more lovers of literature than I’ve ever worked among since”. Even more than the House of Commons? He says that erudition seems to be taken for granted in the House, but in the sorting office there was real passion. “It was like a secret society. These were self-educated men and there was something about them loving words and having no formal education that made them so enthusiastic about talking to someone when they found someone who loved literature as well. They were like tutors to me.”
On his rural round Johnson honed his debating skills in the kitchen of a farmer’s wife, Mrs Rayner, who served coffee, thickly buttered toast and solid Tory opinions. Johnson read Marx and flirted with communism. “I was a boring p**** in the kitchen at parties,” he says cheerfully. He became a branch official of the Union of Post Office Workers (later the Union of Communication Workers) and was spotted by Tom Jackson, its magnificently moustachioed leader, who encouraged him to stand for the union’s executive. It will take another volume of memoir, perhaps, to tell the story of Johnson’s years leading the union, his entry into parliament as MP for Hull West and Hessle in 1997 and his ministerial career, which included stints running the Home Office and the departments of Health and Education.
Could an 18-year-old Alan Johnson today rise to one of the highest political offices? “I think they could but it would be a lot more difficult. Many of the people in here [the House of Commons] who come from poor backgrounds — David Davis, council estate in Wandsworth — it’s university that changes them. Would someone leaving school at 15 still come in here without the trade union movement? Almost impossible.”
Surely someone with his ability would go to university in these days of expanded higher education? “There are a lot of late developers and a lot of bright kids who never dream of going to university. None of their family, friends or people on their street went to university.” In some cases, he believes, their teachers don’t steer them towards university. “This is the great challenge.”
As higher education minister he introduced tuition fees, but he says they have risen too high and the government has cut funds for promoting the idea of university to younger children. He is concerned that the political class is becoming dominated by people who have studied politics at a top university then worked as an adviser before securing a job as an MP with no other job experience. “I do worry about that. It is epitomised now because all three main political leaders came through that route. It’s fine if 10 per cent of MPs do, but if it is much higher than that it’s a disproportionate number and that is almost the only way to get into politics now.”
He still sees poverty in his Hull constituency and many other parts of the country, but it is not as severe as it was when he was growing up. “It’s a bit different. Not poor in the sense that they don’t have electricity and not poor in the sense of living in those appalling conditions, but [they are living] a hand-to-mouth existence and counting every penny. I read The Times, my paper of choice. It was a big decision if I could afford a newspaper.”
Even today, when he is earning an MP’s salary, writing books and wearing a natty Savile Row suit, he is careful with money. “It’s ingrained. You have a fear of debt.” He mixes with people “who have a few bob and speculate and take risks. Some of them take risks on business. I couldn’t do it. When me and my first wife took the decision to buy a car it was a big decision for us, the insecurity of it.”
We are talking in his large corner office in Parliament Street, which previously accommodated Kenneth Clarke and commands views of the Palace of Westminster. The room is piled high with books but Johnson makes a surprising admission. “I can’t stomach political biography. I’ve read very, very few. I’d rather be reading fiction.” But, um, you’re a politician who has written two volumes of memoir. “I’m glad someone’s reading them,” he says, flashing the twinkly Johnson smile that has charmed so many.
When he writes about his life with Judy and their three children (he adopted her daughter by a previous partner) it feels a world away from the new Labour universe in which he was a star. He would be off playing football and drinking while she did all the domestic duties. “It sounds horrible but there’s no point trying to disguise it and suggest I was somehow Polly Toynbee-ish in the Seventies. That was me and that was the culture on the estate. You evolve.”
The couple eventually divorced as Johnson spent more and more time away on union business. “We got married pretty young. Judy married a shelf-stacker and suddenly there was this union official. And I wasn’t attentive enough to her and what was going on. So she got very lonely, I think. She has married again; we are on good terms.”
Johnson also got married again, to Laura, with whom he has a teenage son. In 2011 he resigned as shadow chancellor after his wife had an affair with the police close-protection officer who had been assigned to him while he was home secretary. They divorced this year. Will he ever write about his personal life in this period? “No,” he says quietly. “You open up so much — and you are in charge of what you open up.” It is better to stop telling his story 30 years ago, he says, “otherwise it becomes too personal”.
When people describe him, as they often do, as the best prime minister we never had, does he not feel a pang of regret that he didn’t hold the highest office? “Not at all. I had good fortune to get as far as I got.” There have been calls from other Labour grandees, including David Blunkett and Lord Prescott, for him to be called back to the front bench. “I think they are doing very well without me. [I have] no appetite for being on the front bench. You don’t want anyone there who doesn’t want to be there. I have nothing but admiration for Ed [Miliband] and the way he has dealt with things and his personal kindness to me. It’s nothing to do with Ed at all. It’s to do with me having got whatever ambition was there — there wasn’t a lot in the first place — out of my system. And I really enjoy writing and I couldn’t combine being an MP with having a frontbench role and being a writer.”
If, however, Labour should win the next election, might he consider a return? “I would look at that. Disgracefully!” You can imagine some of his colleagues who are hammering away on the front bench being less than thrilled by this candour. He considered a run for mayor of London but decided “politics is more about being in the chamber of the House of Commons than in City Hall and if I am doing anything for a city I would want it to be for Hull”.
Johnson claims that Ed Miliband should be praised for preventing Labour tearing itself apart in customary fashion after its 2010 general election defeat, but I wonder what he makes of his leader’s unimpressive personal-approval ratings. “When you have not been prime minister people don’t see you as being prime ministerial, might be part of it. It’s unfashionable to be a geek at the moment. He should perhaps have gone away and gone in the army for three years and enhanced his reputation.” A flash of that cheeky smile again.
He is one of the few still prepared to vigorously defend Tony Blair. “It gets up my nose that it’s suddenly de rigueur to slag off Tony Blair. Yes, he’s earning some money. So does every former prime minister, so does every former American president. I will never forget his huge contribution to the Labour party and his personal contribution to me. I wouldn’t be here without Tony.” Blair wrote him a note about his first book. “He said: ‘You have missed your vocation.’ ”
Johnson hasn’t completely ruled out writing a third volume of memoir, but prefers another plan, possibly for fiction. He’ll need a good imagination to spin a yarn more unlikely than his own.
Please, Mister Postman by Alan Johnson is published tomorrow (Bantam Press, £16.99)
In his life before politics Alan Johnson was a postman for 20 years and for a while his round included Dorneywood, the 18th-century mansion in Buckinghamshire used by senior government ministers as a country retreat. Johnson would deliver the mail to a servants’ entrance and never got to look around inside.
By the time Labour came to power in 1997 it had become usual for the house, which is in the gift of the prime minister, to be occupied by the chancellor of the exchequer, but Gordon Brown wanted nothing to do with it. He was, however, very taken with Johnson’s connection to the property.
“Gordon was very excited when he found out. I was PPS [parliamentary private secretary] in the Treasury, my first job in 1997, and someone told him. Gordon would never go there but when he found out I used to deliver there he said: ‘We must find a way to get Alan down there — walk in the front entrance rather than the servants’ entrance.’ I was really looking forward to that but nothing came of it. I felt I shouldn’t go and bother the chancellor: ‘Gordon, remember about taking me to Dorneywood?’ ”
The house was used by John Prescott but still no invitation was forthcoming. Then in 2006 the deputy prime minister was criticised for playing croquet there when he was in charge of the country while Tony Blair was on holiday. “Then everyone had a real fear of using it. I longed to go there for just one weekend but it never happened,” says Johnson. “Now of course George is there . . .”
How about it, Mr Osborne? A Tory chancellor inviting a former Labour former home secretary and shadow chancellor to see inside Dorneywood? Johnson looks a little uncertain when I suggest this could happen, but does volunteer that Osborne is a fan of his book,This Boy. Osborne tweeted that it was “powerful, beautifully written and an extraordinary personal story”.
Johnson, 64, is that rare thing: a politician who is not only popular with MPs on both sides of the House but who connects with voters of all political persuasions. This has been seen to be particularly so since the publication last year of the first volume of his memoirs, which describe his upbringing in a Notting Hill slum. His drunken father beat his mother before walking out on the family, then Johnson’s adored mother died when he was 13, leaving his older sister, Linda, to care for him. The book received glowing reviews, became a bestseller, won awards and prompted a round of comment that perhaps Johnson was the best prime minister we never had.
His new book, Please, Mister Postman, takes us from the late 1960s to the late 1980s and explains how he found a route into politics from the most improbable beginnings. In 1968, aged just 18, Johnson married his first wife, Judy, who was already a single mother, and gave up a job as a shelf-stacker to become a junior postman, first in west London, then in Slough and its rural hinterland.
Johnson left school at 15 but was an autodidact who read voraciously. He bought The Times but was worried about being regarded as pretentious by his colleagues, so hid it “as if it were a pornographic magazine”. However, he writes that he discovered that the sorting office “included more lovers of literature than I’ve ever worked among since”. Even more than the House of Commons? He says that erudition seems to be taken for granted in the House, but in the sorting office there was real passion. “It was like a secret society. These were self-educated men and there was something about them loving words and having no formal education that made them so enthusiastic about talking to someone when they found someone who loved literature as well. They were like tutors to me.”
On his rural round Johnson honed his debating skills in the kitchen of a farmer’s wife, Mrs Rayner, who served coffee, thickly buttered toast and solid Tory opinions. Johnson read Marx and flirted with communism. “I was a boring p**** in the kitchen at parties,” he says cheerfully. He became a branch official of the Union of Post Office Workers (later the Union of Communication Workers) and was spotted by Tom Jackson, its magnificently moustachioed leader, who encouraged him to stand for the union’s executive. It will take another volume of memoir, perhaps, to tell the story of Johnson’s years leading the union, his entry into parliament as MP for Hull West and Hessle in 1997 and his ministerial career, which included stints running the Home Office and the departments of Health and Education.
Could an 18-year-old Alan Johnson today rise to one of the highest political offices? “I think they could but it would be a lot more difficult. Many of the people in here [the House of Commons] who come from poor backgrounds — David Davis, council estate in Wandsworth — it’s university that changes them. Would someone leaving school at 15 still come in here without the trade union movement? Almost impossible.”
Surely someone with his ability would go to university in these days of expanded higher education? “There are a lot of late developers and a lot of bright kids who never dream of going to university. None of their family, friends or people on their street went to university.” In some cases, he believes, their teachers don’t steer them towards university. “This is the great challenge.”
As higher education minister he introduced tuition fees, but he says they have risen too high and the government has cut funds for promoting the idea of university to younger children. He is concerned that the political class is becoming dominated by people who have studied politics at a top university then worked as an adviser before securing a job as an MP with no other job experience. “I do worry about that. It is epitomised now because all three main political leaders came through that route. It’s fine if 10 per cent of MPs do, but if it is much higher than that it’s a disproportionate number and that is almost the only way to get into politics now.”
He still sees poverty in his Hull constituency and many other parts of the country, but it is not as severe as it was when he was growing up. “It’s a bit different. Not poor in the sense that they don’t have electricity and not poor in the sense of living in those appalling conditions, but [they are living] a hand-to-mouth existence and counting every penny. I read The Times, my paper of choice. It was a big decision if I could afford a newspaper.”
Even today, when he is earning an MP’s salary, writing books and wearing a natty Savile Row suit, he is careful with money. “It’s ingrained. You have a fear of debt.” He mixes with people “who have a few bob and speculate and take risks. Some of them take risks on business. I couldn’t do it. When me and my first wife took the decision to buy a car it was a big decision for us, the insecurity of it.”
We are talking in his large corner office in Parliament Street, which previously accommodated Kenneth Clarke and commands views of the Palace of Westminster. The room is piled high with books but Johnson makes a surprising admission. “I can’t stomach political biography. I’ve read very, very few. I’d rather be reading fiction.” But, um, you’re a politician who has written two volumes of memoir. “I’m glad someone’s reading them,” he says, flashing the twinkly Johnson smile that has charmed so many.
When he writes about his life with Judy and their three children (he adopted her daughter by a previous partner) it feels a world away from the new Labour universe in which he was a star. He would be off playing football and drinking while she did all the domestic duties. “It sounds horrible but there’s no point trying to disguise it and suggest I was somehow Polly Toynbee-ish in the Seventies. That was me and that was the culture on the estate. You evolve.”
The couple eventually divorced as Johnson spent more and more time away on union business. “We got married pretty young. Judy married a shelf-stacker and suddenly there was this union official. And I wasn’t attentive enough to her and what was going on. So she got very lonely, I think. She has married again; we are on good terms.”
Johnson also got married again, to Laura, with whom he has a teenage son. In 2011 he resigned as shadow chancellor after his wife had an affair with the police close-protection officer who had been assigned to him while he was home secretary. They divorced this year. Will he ever write about his personal life in this period? “No,” he says quietly. “You open up so much — and you are in charge of what you open up.” It is better to stop telling his story 30 years ago, he says, “otherwise it becomes too personal”.
When people describe him, as they often do, as the best prime minister we never had, does he not feel a pang of regret that he didn’t hold the highest office? “Not at all. I had good fortune to get as far as I got.” There have been calls from other Labour grandees, including David Blunkett and Lord Prescott, for him to be called back to the front bench. “I think they are doing very well without me. [I have] no appetite for being on the front bench. You don’t want anyone there who doesn’t want to be there. I have nothing but admiration for Ed [Miliband] and the way he has dealt with things and his personal kindness to me. It’s nothing to do with Ed at all. It’s to do with me having got whatever ambition was there — there wasn’t a lot in the first place — out of my system. And I really enjoy writing and I couldn’t combine being an MP with having a frontbench role and being a writer.”
If, however, Labour should win the next election, might he consider a return? “I would look at that. Disgracefully!” You can imagine some of his colleagues who are hammering away on the front bench being less than thrilled by this candour. He considered a run for mayor of London but decided “politics is more about being in the chamber of the House of Commons than in City Hall and if I am doing anything for a city I would want it to be for Hull”.
Johnson claims that Ed Miliband should be praised for preventing Labour tearing itself apart in customary fashion after its 2010 general election defeat, but I wonder what he makes of his leader’s unimpressive personal-approval ratings. “When you have not been prime minister people don’t see you as being prime ministerial, might be part of it. It’s unfashionable to be a geek at the moment. He should perhaps have gone away and gone in the army for three years and enhanced his reputation.” A flash of that cheeky smile again.
He is one of the few still prepared to vigorously defend Tony Blair. “It gets up my nose that it’s suddenly de rigueur to slag off Tony Blair. Yes, he’s earning some money. So does every former prime minister, so does every former American president. I will never forget his huge contribution to the Labour party and his personal contribution to me. I wouldn’t be here without Tony.” Blair wrote him a note about his first book. “He said: ‘You have missed your vocation.’ ”
Johnson hasn’t completely ruled out writing a third volume of memoir, but prefers another plan, possibly for fiction. He’ll need a good imagination to spin a yarn more unlikely than his own.
Please, Mister Postman by Alan Johnson is published tomorrow (Bantam Press, £16.99)
